Month: June 2013

You have heard our manta before: schools from kindergardens to college, should be places that invite people in. Educational institutions need to be exciting environments that are well designed. Good design as well as color application sparks learning. When students, kids or adults, want to be at school their minds are better primed for achievement. Depending upon the age of the students the amount of color and stimulus that is appropriate is proportionate to their maturity.

Birkbeck, University of London

Many colleges these days are taking this idea to heart. Colleges, much like tech firms, have found themselves in a very competitive market. Students have a lot of choice when it comes to where to apply and where to spend their education dollars. Colleges are turning to designers and architects to wake up their campuses and attract students to their institution. Two colorful colleges Birkbeck, University of London and Da Vinci College in South Holland demonstrate the concept. Several factors are working in their favor, mature students are comfortable in more colorful environments and European design has long been more adventurous in their application of color .

Birkbeck, University of London

A few years back Birkbeck benefited when England’s government approved funding for new buildings on campuses around the country in an effort to modernize schools and keep students engaged. Surface Architects won the competition held for the school with this bold mix of high gloss, matte, and sharp misleading angles. This dense mix of colors quiets as students enter each individual classroom but the common areas, the hallways, with full padded window benches for studying, encourage lively interaction between students. The colors dare you to be bold with your ideas just to compete with the walls themselves.

Birkbeck, University of London

Da Vinci College

Da Vinci College, a smaller regional college located in the south of Holland also uses color and architecture to welcome students. But not all uses of color in school work. This school populated by younger students with vocational aims uses red and yellow to both great and deleterious effect.

Da Vinci College

The prominent red and yellow glass of the schools is softly colorful during the day and glows like a striped candy at night. The curving walls, vertical stripes and unpatterned colors give this building a warm bees-to-flowers feeling and the color choices work well. That is until you go inside.

Da Vinci College

When the color scheme goes indoors the warm glow persists but the colors and the way they are positioned on the recessed walls some how maintains a kind of brutalist institutionalism. While surely better than an all white paint job, this layout does little to help the space. Instead of , like the Birkbeck building, where the common spaces encourage the mixing of ideas with well thought out color placement, this red and yellow arrangement seems entirely arbitrary and perhaps even chosen solely for ease of application. When color is applied though the building without differentiation between active public spaces and internal quieter classroom situations the color itself works against the functionality and comfort of the end users.

Elsa Schiaparelli, or “Schiap” to her inner circle, was one of the world’s most prominent fashion designers between the two World Wars. And while her rival Coco Chanel often refered to her as just that Italian artist who made clothes, she rose to prominence with what was considered at the time, provocative and progressive creations. Writer Leo Lerman described her in an article as “a headline attraction in the international glitter-glamour freak show of the late twenties and pre-war thirties.” It was during this time, at the height of her Studio’s production, Schiap created much of what came to define her iconic style.

Her designs, testing the definition of wearability, began to break up the literalness of the fashions of the day. From where we are now, experiencing the Red Carpets populated by the design statements of Lady Gaga and Bjork, Schiaparelli’s work seems demure, even polite, but at the time, she was making groundbreaking steps in the deconstruction of fashion. She disregarded the boundaries of acceptability and just let herself create.

A women with many friends including Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Raoul Dufy, Man Ray even Salvadore Dali, her work was laced through with influences from Dada and Surrealism. One of her most famous pieces was an evening dress made in 1938 titled ‘Tear,’ made in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. The painter designed a fabric printed with a torn flesh motif, pale strips peeled back to reveal a visceral red, that first appeared in Dalí’s 1936 painting ‘Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra.’

She had many firsts over the course of her career. She mixed real jewels with fakes, and plastics with gold. She introduced the first jumpsuit, wrap dress and the idea of paper clothes. She invented foldable eyeglasses, brought new materials to couture including latex, straw, rubber, cork, mattress ticking, and made the first shoulder bag for women. Collaborating with Dali, to make early wearable electronics, they designed an evening bag that features a tiny battery-operated street lamp on the outside,

Schiaparelli is famous for her devotion to shocking pink.

Much as we need to see her clothes in the time they were made to truly understand their genius, Schiaparelli herself is also a product of her time. Her twelve commandments for women, starts out with the brave and progressive advice, “Since most women do not know themselves, they should try to do so.” But as her commandments continue they begin to show their age. She tells women to only shop alone or with a man. Why? Because women have an inherent tendency to be jealous. And while she tells women to “buy little and only of the best or the cheapest,” she also says “never fit a dress to the body, but train the body to fit the dress,” which sounds horribly body-phobic to modern ears. Her position on women and clothes was complicated, and sometimes intentionally provacative, when describing the meaning behind fashion she once said “When you take off your clothes, your personality also undresses and you become quite a different person- more true to your self and to your real character, more conscious, sometimes more cruel.”

Schiaparelli’s work left waves in fashion that are still felt to this day. Interestingly she also seems to be an early progenitor of a common theme in clothes today: the skeuomorphic or as the fashion industry would call it trompe-l’oeil shirt. These are meta garments intentionally made to reference another category of clothing while still maintaining their conceptual distance. Much like t-shirts printed to look like tuxedos, these sweaters were made to resemble flouncy blouses. In fact these knit sweaters are what boosted her career, and brought her designs to a wider audience.

After the trials, and liberations that came with WWII, including women now frequently working traditionally male jobs, women had changed. Her theatrical designs no longer appealed to the more practical post war woman, and sadly in 1954 Schiaperelli’s house went bankrupt. To keep herself afloat she was one of the first designers to liscense her name to be used by Playtex girdles, Cutex Nail Polish, Congress laying cards, Sealey mattresses, Longines watches, Vat 69 Scotch, Kraft Italian Dressing, as well as lingerie, handbags, jewelry, eyeglasses, table lines and chewing gum. Schiaparelli was a powerhouse of design, a whirlwind of a personality and a women unafraid of her own abilities. Her ground breaking passion is an inspiration to this day. For more on Schiaparelli check out her autobiography “Shocking Life” or Patricia Volk’s book “Shocked, My Mother, Schiaparelli and Me”.